Tuesday, January 20, 2015

A dozen resolutions for this New Year


It has become a fad to say, let your worries last as long as your New Year resolutions, which sarcastically hints that invariably all New Year resolutions are short lived or soon broken. Well, it is quiet true in many cases and it is really disheartening when our New Year resolution end unfulfilled.
If you observe closely at a New Year resolution it is typically about stopping something old or starting something new. It may be like, you want to give up a bad habit, such as drinking, smoking etc from the start of the New Year or it may be something like you wanting to inculcate a new habit from the beginning of the New Year, like doing a daily exercise or sitting to meditate for few minutes every day. Whatever it may be, it all calls for a disciplined effort. When it comes to disciplining ourselves, it goes without saying that we need follow a fixed monotonous routine. Whatever is monotonous soon gets boring. The energy and optimism with which we created the resolution slowly fades away, as days go by and as other new interesting things come up in life, we tend to lose focus. It is here we feel an urge to take a break and as an end result our New Year resolutions get broken. And once we break the resolution, we never gather the courage to start all over again.
Well, I was just wondering of what better way there could be to make our resolutions work and an idea popped up in my mind.  I asked myself, why a New Year resolution should only revolve around starting something new or stopping something old. Why not it be something to do with doing something current, which we like to do, but never find the time to do.
It is quiet common that all of us have a lot of unfulfilled wishes and desires, but for some reason or other we have been putting it off for a later time.  We wait for the right time or right moment to do it and then later end complaining, that we could never find the time.
For example, I have a lot of pending wishes. There are books I wish to read, old movies I have been wanting to watch,places I have been wanting to visit, programmes I have been wanting to attend, skills I have been wanting to develop, friends I have been wanting to spend time with and so many other things. But because I don’t consciously allot a time for it, it never happens. It continues to be a moving target. So, I was looking at this idea of having an assortment of resolutions, which can be accomplished within a year, rather than having just one resolution.
We could probable resolve to do a bouquet of things, rather than just sticking to one BIG resolution.This makes it more easily achievable and it also would give us a satisfaction of having done many thing in the year. For example, it could be something like:
·        4 books, I will read this year
·        2 new skills I will develop this year
·        2 new places, I will see this year
·        2 family vacations, I will take this year
·        One friends reunion I will initiate this year
·        Watch one old movie every month
·        Watch a specific programme on TV every week (either live or recorded)
This is rather easy to achieve, if we take a little conscious effort. Even, if for some reason, we are not able to accomplish all, we will still get to accomplish majority of them, which will make our year more fulfilling.
I am not sure, how brilliant the idea is or how effective it would be, but something I am planning to try out this year. I invite you to join me in this experiment and let us see how we much we have been able to accomplish at the end of the year.
Let this New Year, help us realize not just one but a dozen resolutions and make this New Year 2015, truly beautiful.
Happy Reading,
D. Senthil Kannan

Article Dated Jan 2015


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